On Labor Day, let's not forget abortion care as a labor right

Companies should pay for travel expenses when employees need reproductive care

As the nation celebrates Labor Day, it’s important to note how employers can support their workers by offering travel reimbursements to them for traveling to states where they would get the abortion care they need. 

According to HR Brew, a recent paper published by researchers with Indeed, the University of Maryland, the University of Southern California, and the Institute of Labor Economics found the decision to offer travel benefits post-Roe may have proved a double-edged sword for employers. While companies that offered the benefits attracted more job-seeker interest than those that didn’t, they also saw their management ratings fall.

That paper, published by,  Allison Shrivastava, Emily Nix, Evan Starr, Jason Sockin, Pawel Adrjan and Svenja Gudell, indicated that hundreds of employers announced support for reproductive healthcare, including covering out-of-state employee travel for abortions, following the June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Supreme Court ruling overturning the federal right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade.

Employers that announced these policies saw an 8 percent increase in clicks on their job postings compared with similar jobs at similar employers that did not announce a policy. The gender and political composition of announcing firms appears to have played a key role in those firms’ decisions to announce supportive reproductive care policies publicly. 

Firms were more likely to announce these benefits if their workforce consisted of more women or Democratic-leaning workers. And firms with any employees in so-called trigger states—states where abortion became illegal as soon as the Dobbs decision was announced—were more likely to announce reproductive health benefits than those with none, but only to a point. 

The higher the company’s share of employees working in trigger states, the less likely that the company was to make a public announcement of new or enhanced reproductive health benefits.

There are some challenges. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, if an employer provides a travel benefit outside of its group health plan, the employer could unwittingly create another group health plan that would raise numerous compliance issues, including ERISA reporting, HIPAA privacy requirements, and COBRA continuation rights, said an alert by attorneys at national law firm Jackson Lewis.

The intersections between labor rights and abortion rights will manifest themselves primarily in whether companies pay for reproductive healthcare as we advance. Since Roe was overturned, it couldn’t be more imperative.